2015, Short review of “Bangkok Billboard” by Maria Medua, Director, Artist Gallery, SFMOMA
 
The billboard is a great subject matter for a painter -- reflexive, providing a picture within a picture, and bringing to mind everything from mass media to the contrast between high and low art. Tudyk chooses a fairly generous scale of 40 inches tall to emphasize sweeping vertical lines that form a complex system of trusses arising from an overgrown light yellow field. The billboard is a grid of sumptuous colored rectangles, including one in an unforgettable indigo blue. Beautiful fracture lines draw attention to the surface, aging it, setting it in time, and giving it a past as well as a present existence that is palpable.
 
The no-nonsense title, “Bangkok Billboard,” signals that the work should be read formally not narratively. It doesn’t much matter that the structure is in Thailand, but its name does have a nice alliteration. With 14 rectangles across and six down, the billboard offers 84 miniature paintings that could be inspired by everything from the minimalism of Robert Ryman to the pop culture collages of Robert Rauschenberg. However, “Billboard” shares more in common with pieces by Jasper Johns.
 
A complicated, overwrought old framework holds something up before us. Seven lamps are perched at the top of the sign. These cast curious corresponding shadows downward. The source of light is vague. We very quickly become aware of the job diagonals do. In the foreground, a roughed out base of ochre partially obscures the bottom of the scaffolding. The background is a grey-blue and indeterminate sky.
 
While billboards are a form of commercial art used by advertisers, “Bangkok Billboard” sells no product. Instead it offers us a matrix of colors -- whites, greys, and umber, the colors of underpainting. Traditionally, grids are used as a way to manage complexity. The artist assigns visual information to quadrants that can be tackled one by one and eventually come together as a whole to depict something. Many artists, including Jasper Johns have deconstructed the picture plane and played with how the grid and the diagonal can interact without creating perspectival representation. “Billboard” has fun with a lot of these ideas. Portrayed at an angle, and propped up on a network of brown lines, the image can be read as an object in three dimensional space. However, there is no need to stop there, when the shapes are so pleasing, the colors wonderful and the verticals that directs our gaze upward are so satisfying.

Maria Medua
Director, Artists Gallery
SFMOMA